Re: dpkg's treatment of symlinks
On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 02:45:41PM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>
> Marco> I found out a little more about my current troubles with the
> Marco> new versions of my packages mozart, mozart-contrib, and
> Marco> mozart-doc-html. The phenomenon is this:
>
> Jérôme> The answer is there:
>
> Jérôme> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200107/msg01666.html
>
> Marco> 2. What do I have to do in order to prevent it from doing it?
>
> Jérôme> See icewm package (maintainer scripts).
>
> I have read the thread mentioned above by Jérôme before, and I think I
> understand the reason why dpkg behaves this way.
At that moment, I had to insist a lot to get explainations.
> But there remains the 'no return' part of Jérôme's post which started
> the thread. Does this mean the maintainer is stuck with a postinst
> hack forever? How is a transition to a symlink shipped as part of the
> package possible in a future version?
I don't know about the dpkg internals. But in my opinion, dpkg could
try to check if the symlink or directory is shared among several
packages and do the replacement iff only one package owns such files.
However, I don't know if such checkings are enough to be safe.
--
Jérôme Marant
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